Workshop
brings a teacher and a group of students together to look at working samples
of literature--either stories or poems or essays--and together they discuss
what makes those pieces successful. It also helps develop our own writing
skills by having our work "juried" by a group of our peers:
this helps us understand what is more successful and less successful in
our own work while also developing our reading and editorial skills.
Workshop
topics will include:
What
is fiction?
Writing fiction gives us the opportunity to escape our own lives through
the invention of character, setting and plot. Fiction is the art of
combining these elements to create a story that reflects both real life
and the imagination of the writer. Good fiction pulls readers into the
story, allowing them to live in the world that the author imagines.
Pulling
Stories From the Air: In this workshop, we will first invent a character,
and he/she will belong to you. Then we will find your, character's story,
and get you to write it. We'll do this as a way of exploring what it
is that fiction writers do, how they make people up, how they shape
a story, how they let luck factor in, how they think about sentences,
how they take the raw clay of a first draft and shape it into something
beautiful or terrifying. We'll use examples, exercises and your own
work.
What
is poetry?
Poetry is the process of re-investigating our lives through writing
to reveal our emotions, perceptions and ideas. Traditionally, poetry
was written using only meter and rhyme, but contemporary poetry focuses
more on sounds, images and open form.
Poetry
can be inspired by both reality and imagination, and often examines
small moments in a way that is unique and surprising.
The
poetry workshop will help students translate feelings, ideas and
memories- the raw material of poetry-into well-crafted poems. We'll
talk about the power of precise, imagistic language, consider how a
poem's shape on the page can communicate its meaning and pay attention
to the many ways sound play happens in poetry. Along the way, we'll
use found material to jumpstart the writing process, think about poems
as maps and treasure chests and discover revision strategies that help
us more accurately express what we want to say.
Speculative
Fiction
This
workshop is for writers interested in speculative or magical-realist
literary fiction. How can one borrow from genre writing such as science
fiction and fantasy to create stories of true literary worth? What does
violating the tradition of realist fiction off the writer and reader?
Over the week we will examine a number of fiction writers from across
the globe who violate the dictates of the real to create interesting
strategies for story telling. The workshop will concentrate on the magical-realist
work of such writers as Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the
"fabulist" genre-bending work of Kelly Link and Alan Deniro,
and the near sci-fi strategies of Kurt Vonnegut, Rikki Ducornet, and
Mathew Derby. Each class we will examine one of these writers for technique
and write a small exercise. These exercises will be workshopped and
expanded as the week progresses. One on one conferences will supplement
the class.
